[I am reading this 2024 novel in three sections, writing about each section before reading on. So far I have read one section. Spoiler alert: If you read this running commentary, you will find out everything that happens in the book as I read it.]
20th January 2025
Part 1, Chapters 1-21
This is a smoothly scathing retelling of Huckleberry Finn. Everett has reinvented Jim, the runaway slave in the novel, as a knowingly articulate first-person narrator. It doesn’t matter that his style is impossibly sophisticated, because Everett never pretends this is anything but a fiction. He sticks closely not only to Mark Twain’s episodic journey form, but also to the parade of impossible characters and situations. James’s status as a slave is realistic but, whenever Huck is nearby, the adventures are a string of tall tales.
I think Percival Everett is my favourite author just now. This is the third of his novels I’ve read recently, and although he never does the same thing twice he’s always dazzling. The Trees is a dark mixture of screwball comedy and rightful anger. Erasure, fizzing with just as many ideas, is a different kind of satire. James is different again.
The first chapter has James and others act out the novel’s main conceit. It’s night-time, and James overhears Huck with Tom Sawyer planning a raid on the kitchen. They see James, but he pretends to be asleep.. He’s playing the game, presenting to the white folks the persona they have invented for Blacks: superstitious, slow, and childishly naïve. They play a little trick on him, telling each other that ‘Jim’ will think it was a witch who made his hat appear on the nail above his head. Minutes later as he is talking in perfect English to other slaves, his friend Albert warns him white folks are close. ‘Lak I say, I furst found my hat up on a nail. “I ain’t put dat dere,” I say to mysef. “How dat hat git dere?” And I knew ’twas witches what done it. I ain’t seen ’em, but it was dem.’
In the next chapter James gives his family what he calls a language lesson. ‘These were indispensable. Safe movement through the world depended on mastery of language, fluency.’ When they ask why, he reminds them. ‘White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them. … The only ones who suffer when they are made to feel inferior is us.’ This is also Everett spelling out the same lesson to the reader, starting with behaviour rules—‘Never make eye contact … Never speak first’—right down to direct ‘situational’ translations, as James calls them, from standard English. If a slave sees a fire, the correct response is not ‘Fire, fire!’ as one child suggests, but ‘“Lawdy, missum! Looky dere.’ When he asks why, the children tell him: ‘Because we must let the whites be the ones who name the trouble.’ Why? ‘Because they need to know everything before us. Because they need to name everything.’
And we’re only in the second chapter. I guess one reason Everett decided to explain all this at the start was so that he wouldn’t need to keep explaining later. The behaviour and language codes are established, and throughout all the chapters I’ve read so far James rarely puts a foot wrong. Twice, in fever dreams—James has been bitten by a rattlesnake—Huck overhears his true speech patterns. And when James once becomes too relaxed, as he explains ruefully to himself, he responds ironically with the remark, ‘Hysterical,’ and Huck is immediately on to him.
The other reason is probably that Everett wanted to tell us in advance what he was going to spend a lot of the novel showing to us, out in the world. We understand the process of doublethink and doublespeak that James constantly has to go through—and we understand how, in order to survive, the Blacks have to present themselves as incapable of sensible thinking. In a typical Everett narrative conceit, James’s fever dreams allow some of the great philosophers to voice their prejudices in person. How about Voltaire? ‘I think we are all equal, regardless of colour, language or habit. … However … climate and geography can be significant factors in determining human development. It’s not that your features make you unequal, it’s that they are signs of biological differences, things that have helped you survive in those hot, desolate places. It’s those factors that stop you from achieving the more perfect human form found in Europe.’
These dream conversations also show us how far James has come in his self-teaching. He has spent a lot of time secretly in Judge Thatcher’s library, a place we’ve seen him denying any interest in for reasons that white folks would take for granted. It seems that sometimes their prejudices can be turned to advantage…. But Everett never lets us forget how precarious a slave’s existence is. To find wood to to keep his family warm during a cold spell he has to resort to subterfuges, but that’s nothing. The family, he learns, is to be split up—he is to be sold down the river, literally, in New Orleans.
This is when the odyssey, if that’s what it is, begins. To start with, he doesn’t intend to run far. He decides hide almost in plain sight, on a nearby island in the river. But—what are the chances?—he does it on the same day that Huck has faked his own death in order to escape from his bullying father. He has to let Huck work out how bad this looks for a runaway slave—he’ll be the prime suspect. But nobody will be searching nearby, and they stay for the time being. And we get James’s version of Huck’s adventures, from foraging for food and fishing to the rainstorm that almost floods them out. There’s the house floating down the river, temporarily snagged on something so they hastily board to take supplies and clothes.
Huck’s return to the shore dressed as a girl seems almost sensible in this version. Not only does it give James a chance to hear news of his family, there are other possible benefits. He had salvaged paper and ink from the house, but only now that he is alone can Everett have him set out in writing—by mimicking the letters in the books he’s read—his own sense of who he is. It’s a pivotal moment for him, and for the novel. ‘I am called Jim. I have yet to choose a name. / In the religious preachings of my white captors I am a victim of the Curse of Ham. … But I will not let this condition define me. I will not let myself, my mind, drown in fear and outrage. I will be outraged as a matter of course. But my interest is in how these marks that I am scratching on this page can mean anything at all. If they can have meaning, then life can have meaning, then I can have meaning.’
If this novel is a ‘what if?’ thought experiment—and what is it, if not that?—then this is the crux of it. An uneducated slave, transformed into an erudite thinker, can begin to define his own oppression…
…but at a more mundane level, James can think of other, more pragmatic benefits deriving from Huck’s absence. Huck might be found out, and he might be blamed for helping James to escape… but the heat would be off James for the supposed murder. And, if Huck does return, he might bring news from home. His reasoning is completely unsentimental. There is a growing mutual regard, but there are definite limits. He will always be a slave, and Huck will always be able to regard his own freedom as a right. James might have become a de facto philosopher, but he’s still a slave.
It’s his slave status that defines the parameters of his adventures from now on. He and Huck have to leave the island, Huck having been followed as he returned, and the journey begins. Everett broadly follows the story of Huckleberry Finn, but it only as a tall-tale scaffolding for James’s day-by-day, or even minute-by-minute navigation through a danger-strewn world. In the original novel, Jim was a supporting player while Huck, almost a Candide figure, learned about the absurdities of the American South. Now it’s the other way around. The adventure with the thieves on the half-capsized paddle-boat is no longer an episode in an adventure yarn, but a chance for James to show us how precarious his life is—and for him to be able to take some books he’d seen in Judge Thatcher’s library. How to persuade Huck he really wants them while not admitting his own literacy?
‘“Why you holdin’ them books?” Huck asked. “Dey feels good,” I said. “That’s funny. How kin a book feel good?” He grabbed the Rousseau and thumbed through it. “It ain’t even got pictures.” “I likes the weight of ’em,” I said. Huck stared at me for a long few seconds. “I guess I don’t understand niggers,” he said.’
James hasn’t met any white men yet, but in these first chapters when he is only with Huck, the reader is constantly seeing the behaviour and language codes reinforced. Meanwhile, James keeps reminding Huck that he is a slave, and while they can look after one another they can’t really be friends. This is hard for Huck, but when they do finally come across two white men, having been caught unawares—James is rueful about having become too relaxed—it’s Huck who saves him. He has thrown a tarpaulin over James, asleep in plain sight, and the men don’t notice Huck isn’t alone at first. Then they do, and when they start asking questions Huck has to think fast. What would make them leave him alone? ‘“That there is my sick uncle,” Huck said. “Oh, yeah?” I felt something snag the raft, maybe a hook, maybe a hand. “Yeah,” Huck said. “I bring him out for air every day. He’s got the smallpox.” The raft was let go.’
They are safe, but things happen faster now. That night, after they are separated when a steamboat piles into their raft, James spends some time in the grittier world of Black people’s lived experience. He reaches the shore with his precious books and, exhausted, falls asleep. Luckily, the voices he hears in the morning belong to four Black men, and they tell him he is in Illinois. ‘So, I’m in a free state?’ he asks, but the men laugh. ‘Boy, you’re in America.’ The whites pretend they are in Tennessee, and there’s nothing the Blacks can about it. James sees this in action when one of the men, Young George, steals a pencil for him. Later, as the threat of dogs makes him leave his camping spot, he passes by the scene of a sadistic-sounding whipping. Young George is being punished for the theft of the pencil…
…which makes the piece James has started writing all the more resonant. ‘My name is James. I wish I could tell my story with a sense of history as much as industry. I was sold when I was born… […] I can tell you that I am a man who is cognizant of his world, a man who has a family, who loves a family, who has been torn from his family, a man who can read and write, a man who will not let his story be self-related, but self-written.’ There’s the crux of it. This isn’t some edited, over-elaborated version, like the one by ‘Venture Smith’ that he has been reading. This is the plain truth, as a slave writes it.
By chance, he hears Huck’s voice. He’s been off on his Montagues and Capulets adventure with the warring families, and it’s all coming to a bloody climax. With Huck are four other white people, including the star-crossed lovers, and what comes next isn’t pretty. ‘“Ima gonna fill you fulla lead, Grangerford.” “Have at, you lily-livered sheep-fucker!”’ Despite Huck’s shouted warnings, following a short gunfight all four are dead. Huck and James run and, again by chance, they find their canoe, which had been stolen before. That’s why they had been on a fragile, clumsy raft when the steamboat bore down on them, and having the canoe back is a godsend. Except it’s getting light, and James has a choice to make. Setting out on the river in broad daylight seems crazy, but staying is impossible: ‘Dead white people in the vicinity of a black man never worked out well for the black man.’
Meanwhile, James has been ‘thinking aloud,’ and has let his guard slip a little. In the stress of the moment he’d forgotten the language codes, and Huck is curious. ‘“Jim … Why you talking so funny?” “Whatchu be meanin’?” I was panicking inside. “You were talkin’—I don’t know—you didn’t sound like no slave.”’ James asks him, ‘How do a slave sound?’—as if he hadn’t made a lifelong study of it. And he is careful to use the code from now on.
Next, and finally for now: their misadventures with the Duke of Bridgewater and the King of France. This is pretty close to the original version, except for the crucial difference of the point of view. The white men’s easy assumption of ownership is as in the original—one of them tries to sell James as soon as he meets another white man—but an easy sense of superiority isn’t all. A tramp through the woods suddenly becomes harrowing for James. The rope scars on a tree show its purpose, and he thinks back to Young George’s whipping—but for a white man it’s different. It’s the King who says, ‘“I love walkin’ on a country road. … There’s just somethin’ about it, the air, the openness.’
And there are other distressing reminders for James of who he is in this world. He becomes a prop in the King’s act, as a cannibal from Borneo, and his provenance is doubted and discussed. The King gives him new names, almost at random. Being talked about, being given new names… welcome to the slave market, folks. But the real threat is the ‘Wanted’ sign they see in a shop window as he and Huck escape from the men in the uproar following the performance. Is James the ‘runaway’ it describes? He says to Huck, ‘I’se afraid it be me. Even if’n it not, it look a whol lot lak me.’ And Huck reads out to him, as if he hadn’t already seen it, that there’s a three-hundred-dollar reward for him. This is Illinois, but so? James has really had it brought home to him, ‘Boy, you’re in America.’
We can read it for you wholesale 